BEWARE THE RAHM

After pledging
his support for the Second Amendment during the campaign,
President-elect Barack Obama appoints devout gun-ban supporter Rahm
Emanuel as his chief of staff.

by Dave Kopel

America's 1st Freedom, Jan.
2009

Barack Obama's
children may be getting a new puppy, but American gun owners will soon
be the targets of an attack dog named Rahm Emanuel.

On Jan. 20,
this fierce enemy of the Second Amendment will become the chief of staff
to the president of the United States.

The White
House chief of staff is known as the "second most powerful man in
Washington" and even the "co-president." He decides who gets to meet
with the president, supervises the entire White House staff, advises the
commander-in-chief on policy and negotiates with Congress, interest
groups and the rest of the executive branch. If the president is not a
hands-on manager--and Barack Obama has little executive experience other
than in heading his own presidential campaign--the chief of staff can be
like a de facto prime minister.

Regardless of
exactly how the Obama White House is organized, Emanuel will be one of
the most powerful men in the world. Nobody disputes that Emanuel is
extremely intelligent, ruthlessly partisan and brilliantly shrewd in his
pursuit of power. Unfortunately, that power has often been used to the
detriment of the Constitution. When Bill Clinton wanted to target the
Second Amendment, he made Emanuel his gun czar.

Time
magazine noted Emanuel's reputation as a "profane, hyperactive attack dog." His
tactics and style are fully consistent with the world of Chicago machine
politics, from which both Obama and he sprung.

Emanuel served
as a top fundraiser for President Clinton, helping to raise a
then-record $72 million for Clinton. Rolling Stone magazine
reported that at a dinner celebrating Clinton's election win, Emanuel
began reeling off the names of his enemies. As he said each name, he
stabbed a steak knife into the table. "Dead! Dead! Dead!" he screamed as
he said each enemy's name.

"When he was
done, the table looked like a lunar landscape," one of the other diners
remembered. "It was like something out of The Godfather. But
that's Rahm for you."

Emanuel's
first big foray into politics was serving as the major fundraiser for
the 1980 campaign of congressional candidate David Robinson of Illinois,
who was challenging incumbent Republican Paul Findley. Both candidates
were A-rated by NRA.

Strangely,
Handgun Control, Inc. (today, the Brady Campaign) entered the race by
running anti-Findley TV commercials with actors purporting to be from
Findley's district, even though they were not. The commercials could
have taught Emanuel a lesson about the veracity of the gun-ban lobby
but, as we shall see, the lesson went unlearned.

In Chicago,
Emanuel became a close friend of David Axelrod, the machine politics
master who would become the chief strategist for the Obama presidential
campaign.

Under Clinton,
Emanuel was appointed assistant to the president for political affairs,
and was later promoted to senior advisor to the president for policy and
strategy. He was the White House point man for the offensive against the
Second Amendment.

In 1998,
Clinton forbade the import of 58 types of firearms and their
accessories. At the time, Clinton staffer Jose Cerda proudly announced,
"We are taking the law and bending it as far as we can to capture a
whole new class of guns." [LA Times,
Oct. 22, 1997.]

Emanuel
defended the ban on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, repeatedly
claiming that the banned guns were "military weapons, not sporting
weapons."

"Those weapons
were designed for one purpose--military--and they don't belong on our
streets," he insisted.

Emanuel
asserted that Clinton had banned "the AK-47," which was pure nonsense.
The AK-47, which is a fully automatic rifle, was not covered by the
import ban. Indeed, not one of the guns banned was an automatic, nor
were any of the guns manufactured primarily for military use.

All the banned
guns were used in target competitions. Some had names like "Hunter" or "Sporter."
So how did Clinton and Emanuel get around the 1986 federal law requiring
that imports must be allowed if the gun is "particularly suitable for or
readily adaptable to sporting purposes"?

Emanuel argued
that it was permissible to ban the guns because comments from hunting
guides showed that the guns were rarely recommended for hunting trips.
As if the only gun that is a "sporting" gun is one used by people who
can afford to take trips with a professional guide.

Emanuel
further contended that the guns should be banned because they "accept
rounds in the 20, 30, 40, in some cases 100 rounds at a case [sic]." Of
course, every gun that accepts a detachable magazine can accept a
detachable magazine of any size. So Emanuel's theory would actually set
the stage for a ban on every gun that uses a detachable magazine.

Emanuel was
also the lead man in Clinton's successful effort to require that trigger
locks be sold with handguns--even if the buyer already owned a gun safe.

In February
1998, the "waiting period" of the Brady Act expired. When passing the
Brady Act in 1993, Congress had set the expiration date, by which time
the National Instant Check System (NICS) would be functioning, so there
would be no need to delay gun purchases in order to conduct background
checks.

Yet in 1998,
Clinton announced that one of his "top priorities" would be a permanent
waiting period on handgun sales. Emanuel declared that the waiting
period "is very, very important."

Promoting the
Clinton plan on Meet the Press on June 14, 1998, Emanuel
maintained that "the five-day waiting period was established for a
cooling-off period for crimes of passion."

However, that
was completely untrue. Congress had rejected the notion of a
"cooling-off period." The waiting period was intended to operate only
until the NICS was in place. Even Clinton's Assistant Attorney General
Eleanor Acheson had admitted to Congress, in testimony on Sept. 30,
1993, that there were no statistics to indicate that handguns were
frequently used in crimes within a few days of purchase.

Yet Emanuel
asserted: "Based on police research, 20 percent of the guns purchased
that are used in murder are purchased within the week of the murder."

The NRA called
Emanuel's office to find out exactly where that "factoid" had come from.
Turns out, it was not "police research" at all. The phony statistic had
come from what Emanuel's office called "briefing materials provided by
Handgun Control, Inc."

The NRA called
HCI to track down the source of the factoid. But despite repeated
requests, HCI never supplied any source.

In October
1998, Emanuel resigned from the White House. In 2000, Clinton
appointed Emanuel to the Board of Directors for the Federal Home Loan
Mortgage Corporation ("Freddie Mac"). He earned an annual salary of
$231,655. We now know that during that time, Freddie Mac was sowing the
seeds of the current financial crisis, encouraging banks to make home
loans to buyers who could not repay them. Yet Freddie Mac was able to
protect itself from reform by using shady accounting to cover up its
problems. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Freddie
Mac duped investors by making false reports of billions of dollars of
profits from 2000 to 2002, while Emanuel was a director.

The Office of
Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (OFHEO) later determined that the
Freddie Mac board on which Emanuel served "failed in its duty to follow
up on matters brought to its attention."

After
resigning from the Freddie Mac board, Emanuel ran for a U.S. House of
Representatives seat from Chicago and was elected in 2002.

In the House,
Emanuel quickly earned a perfect "F" rating from the NRA Political
Victory Fund (PVF). He repeatedly voted against the Protection of Lawful
Commerce in Firearms Act, which protected gun stores and manufacturers
from abusive lawsuits by politicians such as Chicago Mayor Richard
Daley.

He announced
his support for outlawing the sale of ordinary handguns and allowing
only the sale of so-called "smart guns"--even though "smart gun"
technology is as yet far too unreliable for a gun that is needed for
self-defense.

Emanuel
cosponsored H.R. 1312, a bill to impose a permanent ban on so-called
"assault weapons." The bill was even worse than the ban that had been
enacted by Congress in 1994, and which expired in 2004. The new ban
would have allowed administrative action, without congressional
approval, to outlaw the domestic sale or manufacture of even more guns.

Emanuel's
prodigious talents and ferocity were quickly recognized by other House
Democrats. By his third term in the House, he had risen to the
fourth-highest position among the Democratic leadership, as chair of the
Democratic Caucus. He also snared the position of head of the Democratic
Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for the 2006 House elections.

There, he
acted pragmatically. In districts where the pro-Second Amendment vote
was strongest, Emanuel often recruited pro-Second Amendment Democratic
candidates. Although the House Democratic leadership, including Nancy
Pelosi and Emanuel himself, was passionately anti-gun, the DCCC did not
impose an anti-gun litmus test since electing the largest possible
number of Democrats was their singular goal.

"They've got
to reflect their districts," Emanuel acknowledged. His strategy worked,
and pro-gun Democrats provided the margin for the Democratic takeover of
the House in the 2006 elections.

So what will
Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel do in the White House?

Well, we can
be sure that his 2006 approach to gun issues did not spring from a
newfound affection for the Second Amendment. It was simply a recognition
of the political strength of the National Rifle Association,
particularly leading up to congressional elections.

Consequently,
the stronger the NRA remains, the greater the chance of deterring
Emanuel from encouraging a major anti-gun push in Congress.

Political
calculations can change, especially if there is a terrorist attack or
other infamous crime. As Emanuel told The New York Times in early
November, "You don't ever want a crisis to go to waste; it's an
opportunity to do important things that you would otherwise avoid."

Pro-rights
forces need to be ready now, and not wait to mobilize until it is too
late.

Meanwhile, as
Emanuel well knows, the president has great authority to act
unilaterally to restrict civil rights--particularly if the president is
willing to "bend" the law.

Will Rahm
Emanuel be able to stab a knife into the Constitution and scream that
the Second Amendment is "Dead! Dead! Dead!"?

That answer
depends mainly on whether American gun owners and other friends of the
Constitution become active, and stay active, for the next four years.

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